Teenager corrects NASA data collected from International Space Station (ISS)

A teenager has achieved something that even the highly talented experts at NASA could not. 17-year old Miles Soloman from Britain has identified a key error related to data collected by NASA from the International Space Station (ISS). In his Tapton School in Sheffield, Soloman was working on the TimPix project, which allows students to analyze data recorded by radiation detectors onboard the ISS. Soloman noticed that false data was being recorded by the radiation sensors, and he immediately emailed this error to NASA.

NASA scientists found this to be extremely valuable and termed the discovery as “pretty cool”. Soloman appeared quite excited to have identified the error, as he said, “It’s pretty cool. You can tell your friends, I just emailed NASA and they’re looking at the graphs that I’ve made.” The key error identified by Soloman was that the radiation sensors were giving a negative reading when there was no radiation hitting the detectors. Folks at NASA said that they were aware of the basic problem, but they did not know that it was happening several times every day.